The American West

Like no other western animal the coyote has been a central character in the Pleistocene West, the Native West, and the Frontier. One of the epic stories of the Modern West is how coyotes are transferring their own brand of western survivalism to the entire country. Despite a $500 million-dollar war to exterminate them, the coyote is in fact The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.

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When the U.S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed that the West endures into the modern age.

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When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruction of western animals threatened to destroy millions of years of North American evolution. Teddy Roosevelt’s and George Grinnell’s Boone & Crockett Club wasn’t perfect, but it helped government usher in a new stage before Wild Wild West anarchy could run its co...

America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history, understanding the more realistic and accurate version of its 19th and 20th century story seems a critical step as we figur...

Present on the continent for nearly half-a-million years, the American bison’s numbers and near perfect adaptation to the Great Plains made it one of the evolutionary marvels of Earth. For more than 10,000 years, Native people in the West had intertwined their lives with bison herds to create the longest sustained economies and religious traditions in American history. Then over two centuries of whirlwind change in Native Ame...

Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappeared, today grizzly bears are surviving, spreading, and distinguish the Mountain West from all other regions in the Lower 48.

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As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued this role until the arrival of people from the Old World initiated a continent-wide war against wolves. While wo...

Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group of adventuring artists and photographers helped divert America’s gaze from the horrors of war by seeking out the most dramatic western landscapes and painting or photographing their scenery. By the 1870s most Americans and many people around the world knew about the Wind River ...

Before 1850 the artist and naturalist John James Audubon was America’s most famous celebrity. His Birds of America was widely regarded as “the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature.” But like Thoreau, Audubon was also a witness to the growing destruction of wild America. That was particularly evident when he and his sons journeyed up the Missouri River in the early 1840s to finish Audubon’s book on...

When the western artist George Catlin journeyed to the Southern Plains in 1834 the animal that caught his attention there was the wild horse, which covered the country in immense herds. Little known to Catlin, or to Thomas Jefferson, who longed to know about horses in their natural state, horses were so successful in the western wilds because they were original natives of North America. Eventually a trade in wild horses dominated t...

When Lewis & Clark saw the West in the first years of the 1800s it still preserved the healthy biodiversity of Native-managed ecologies in place for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that...

Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two talented and committed painters, one American and one European, left the future a rich and varied body of “Time Machine Visuals” of the Missouri River West in the 1830s. George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian whose life’s work was to be the historian of Native people. Ca...

Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of the interior West was still a place of conjecture, rumor, and mystery. What was out there? What kind of never-known phenomena did the West hold? For the brand-new United States and its Indian Agents, winning the western tribes with trade was essential geopoli...

Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers ...

America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us,...

In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it t...

Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its...

For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered....

Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of Amer...